I've been using Movie 15 to create narrated PDF files. Works well in Adobe Acrobat and may soon work on the iPad, too (pdf readers there are promising to handle embedded sound). But Movie 15 is now "deprecated".

The replacement, Media9 seems to depend on a Flash engine (built into desktop Adobe Acrobat readers) to play media including sound. Bad choice, it seems to me since, in addition to IOS which is Flash-free, Flash is disappearing from Linux, desktop browsers and possibly elsewhere.

Is the "deprecation" of Movie 15 going to be a problem for its continued use? Is there an alternative way to embed sound in LaTeX-sourced PDFs?

Just one update: PDF Expert for the iPad (v 4.0) now supports embedded media... but audio embedded by Movie 15 that works well in the background on Acrobat (OSX) will play in PDF Expert only as an attachment (i.e. in a new full-screen window). That is, not embedded!
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Peter W GallagherApr 5 '12 at 22:37

In the LaTeX world, packages which are deprecated almost always remain available. It's an important concept that any 'stable' code stays around so that existing documents can be compiled. So using movie15 should not be an issue in that sense.

On the specific point about the method for inclusion of multimedia content, my understanding is that Adobe have changed the supported methods in Reader, and so it is a question of keeping up with the 'official' route. Multimedia support is pretty tricky to pull off in PDFs as the tools available vary between viewers and platforms. The beamer package includes some code in the multimedia add-on which does not use Flash to embed anything, and which is not about to be deprecated. (It's also not about to have new features added, but that is different!) The author of both movie15 and media9, Alexander Grahn, has recently provided some useful information to fix a bug in multimedia, so I don't think he is ignoring other users, but is simply focussing on an area he feels he can manage to support.

It can happen that packages are removed from TeX Live for licensing reasons. The media15 package was removed some weeks ago because of doubts whether it could be considered as free software (but then reinstated). However the packages should always remain on CTAN unless their author withdraw them.
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egregMay 6 '12 at 8:50

Thank you for this answer, Joseph. Much appreciated. Just saw it, so sorry for the late response. Best, Peter
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Peter W GallagherMay 29 '12 at 23:41